Oliver Ding - Activity Analysis Center (Page 4)

Introduction to Weave the Life: The Life-as-Activity Approach (v4.0) and Personal Knowledge Ecology

It re‑presents the work through a unified symbolic system — the Weave form — and, for the first time, organizes the full territory of the Life‑as‑Activity Approach (v4.0) around the concept of Personal Knowledge Ecology.

Appropriating Activity Theory #16: The Tool That Kept Changing Its Purpose

The tool kept changing its purpose. But it never stopped being a mediating tool. That, perhaps, is what Activity Theory would have predicted all along.

Weave the Theory: Unfolding the Way of Curation

What I did not expect was that, years later, my own explorations in this direction would lead to a similar situation.

Weave the Theory: A Case Study of the AAS Framework Development

The AAS case adds a methodological contribution that none of the previous cases feature. It demonstrates the Aspects-to-Approaches crossing as the originating move of theoretical work — a crossing that happened in less than a month ...

Weave the Curativity: When Advancing Dances with Analyzing

The present article adds a third application to the Dramatic Life Pattern series: Weave-AA, the alternating dance of Advancing and Analyzing woven into the structural space of Weave-the-Theory.

Life-as-Activity: The Weave-the-Life Framework (v3.0)

In April 2026, while working on the Weave 42 project, I developed a new version of the Weave Basic Form, a 4×4 edition that I call the Weave 16 diagram. Based on the new diagram, I created the Weave-the-Life framework (v3.0) and used it to curate 16 key concepts of the Life-as-Activity Approach.

Dramatic Life Pattern: The Watershed I Lived By

Each time, the word "watershed" appeared as a natural descriptor for a structural moment that changed the shape of what came before and after. In this article, I formally name and develop this pattern as Creative Watershed.

Activity Analysis Network #15: Dream, Watershed, and Dramatic Life Pattern

The Landscape of Strategic Developmental Psychology (SDP, v1.2) features three dimensions: The Curativity of Mind, Supportive Life Discovery, and Dramatic Life Pattern. Notably, both the RR practice and the Watershed are identified as examples of Dramatic Life Pattern.

Revisiting and Rebuilding: A Journey of Developing a New Practice

Throughout this process, I found myself frequently drawing on the Revisiting–Rebuilding (RR) strategy to advance various knowledge frameworks — returning to earlier work, reactivating dormant concepts, and rebuilding them from a more developed theoretical standpoint.

Appropriating Activity Theory #15: Before, After, and Watershed

After editing that chronicle, “watershed” became a new theme for me. I began to wonder whether similar dividing lines existed in my decade‑long journey of appropriating Activity Theory. This issue of the column is dedicated to that theme.